Untold History: How WA ballet icon Terri Charles got the State dancing after legendary global acclaim

Flicking through a scrapbook about WA ballet doyenne Terri Charlesworth is to take a trip through the history of dance in this State. And it also takes one around the globe following the list of places where Ms Charlesworth took her talent as a ballerina and dance teacher to much acclaim, including Russia, China, England, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong and Monaco. And her contribution has continued in WA as a choreographer, producer, director and teacher, inspiring many young West Australian dancers to great heights. Ms Charlesworth was born in Perth in 1936 and fell in love with music and dance as a young girl. As part of her induction as a State Cultural Treasure in 2022 Ms Charlesworth said she saw children dancing in the street after she had moved with her mother to Melbourne. “I went back to my mother and I said ’I would love to do that’, “I remember this church hall at the end of the street, and it was a Mrs Lawrence, and next to no time she had me dressed up as a little sailor and I was carried around in the splits, and that’s my sort of beginning of my love of performing and love of dancing. “It grew and grew. It’s something very innate in you. You just love the movement and you love the rhythm and have just got to keep moving,” she said. After enrolling in a dance group at the age of five Ms Charlesworth learned ballet, singing, tap dancing and acrobatics. Her teacher noticed her special talent and she then went on to concentrate on ballet. Aged 12, she joined a class for gifted ballet dancers under the tutelage of Kira Bousloff, who was with the National Theatre Ballet in Melbourne and later moved to Perth. On a later visit to Perth, aged just 16, Ms Charlesworth met Madame Bousloff again and accepted an invitation to join the WA Ballet Company being formed by Madame Bousloff. “I went home to Melbourne and told my mother. It was the first time I’d seen her cry for a long time but I was so confident I just got on the plane and came,” Ms Charlesworth told The West Australian in 2007. “It was 1952. I was in the WA Ballet Company and playing in 1953 at His Majesty’s (Theatre).” In 1957 she became the first Australian dancer to represent Australia at the World Youth International Dance Competition in Moscow. She performed The Brolga, a solo choreographed by Bousloff which won her the Ulanova Laureate prize from a jury headed by Galina Ulanova, considered one of the greatest ballet dancers of the 20th century. While on her way to Moscow, she toured and performed in China. She then travelled by train across Siberia to Moscow, where an excited film crew waited to interview the girl who could supposedly dance on a sheep. “It took us ages to realise I had actually danced on a ship and it had got lost in translation,” she told The West. The same year she practised and observed teaching methods at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow, then studied and performed in London and Italy. Ms Charlesworth told The West Australian that in the early years the WA ballet scene included many talented migrants including from places such as Lithuania and Ukraine, and others came to WA as guest artists. “The WA Ballet company’s standard was very good,” Ms Charlesworth said. “It was a real hub of inspiration and excitement.” “People went on to do some really good things.” In 1959 Ms Charlesworth became principal ballerina at WA Ballet and the next year assistant artistic director, and opened the Terri Charlesworth School of Ballet. The school trained some of WA’s finest dancers. In 1972, Ms Charlesworth co-founded the Graduate College of Dance, offering WA’s first tertiary-level dance course. In the late 1970s, she founded Kinetikos, WA’s first professional contemporary dance company, and developed the Vaganova technique she later introduced at the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne. Her international journey included stints teaching in Japan, Hong Kong, Monaco, Greece and Italy, incorporating a “pretty special” three years in Monaco’s glitzy Monte Carlo in the 1980s. Monaco’s Prince Rainier loved circus and Ms Charlesworth was asked to choreograph, for him, a ballet with a circus theme. “It was so funny and it played in a beautiful, baroque theatre,” she said. Ms Charlesworth is immensely proud of her work teaching children. She once recalled returning from a study tour to Russia in the late 1970s and thinking Russian children had only two arms and two legs, and their only advantage over young Australians was the opportunity to learn dance, which she set to work providing. In the 1990s, she wrote the Education Department’s Year 11 and 12 ballet studies course. He love of dance also flowed through to her family. Her daughters Sonya Shepherd and Lara Gandini became dancers and ballet teachers of note, and Sonya’s daughter, Briana Shepherd became the first Australian to be accepted into the New York City Ballet company. In 2000 Ms Charlesworth and Sonya Shepherd established an accredited course at the Terri Charlesworth Ballet Centre. It enabled pupils to attend the centre full-time while doing their academic studies by correspondence. In 1994 Ms Charlesworth was awarded an Order of Australia for service to ballet and dance and was WA’s citizen of the year for the arts in 2006. Sonya Shepherd established Youth Ballet WA in 2005 with her mother as founding artistic director. Ms Shepherd told The West Australian her mother had the ability to “to see these tiny little things in a person that nobody else could see and enabled her to create a dancer”. Ms Charlesworth said in 2022 that she had experienced some wonderful times. “I just love all my students, and the older I get I just feel as if there’s so much more I want to be able to give,” she said. “I’m still learning from the students on how to impart this knowledge. “It’s very exciting when all of a sudden you see them, ‘oh this is what you mean’, yes, you see the muscles working, yes, give more spirit. Listen to the music. “Even today now . . . I listen to the music and I just go with it, I use my arms, I use my whole being. “After all, we did grow up in the very early days in the mother’s womb with the heart, one two three, one two three, one two three, so I’ve just never lost this,” Ms Charlesworth said. As to the key to becoming a good ballet dancer? “Just love what you are doing,” she told The West Australian. “Just love your dancing. Be very generous and learning.” Ms Charlesworth will be celebrated at a gala showcase at His Majesty’s Theatre on July 3.